“The problem is,” my mother said, sitting on a bench in the Gardens, “that while we are programmed to want ethics, the program doesn’t tell us what right and wrong actually are. These categories are empty in the brain and require us to fill them up with what? Thought. Judgment. Stuff of this kind.”
“One of the general principles of human behavior, I’ve found,” my father added, walking up and down in front of her, “is that in almost every situation, everyone believes himself or herself to be right, and any opponent wrong.”
To which my mother rejoined, “Also we live in a time in which there is almost no agreement on any existential questions, we can’t even concur simply on what is the case, and when the nature of the real is so disputed, so must the nature of the good be.”
When they got going like this they were like dancers, or badminton players, their words moving in harmony, their rackets wafting the shuttlecock back and forth, forth and back again. “So de idea that we have an ethics instinct doesn’t carry with it de notion that we know what those ethics should be. If that were true philosophers would be out of a job and we would live in a less contentious world,” my father was pointing at me with a finger now, you see?, you getting this?, and I like a schoolboy nodding, yes, Dad, yes Mom, I get it, we all agree on this, these are things we know.
“Yeah, but did you know there’s a word for it?” my father asked me.
A word for what, Dad.
“Definition: De supposed innate ability of de human mind to realize de basic principles of ethics and morals. A technical term of philosophy, signifying de innate principle in de moral consciousness of every man, which directs him to good and restrains him from evil.”
No, Dad, what word would that be.
“Synderesis,” my mother said. “Did you ever hear a better word?”
“There isn’t a better word,” my father concurred. “Remember it, kiddo. De best word in de world.”
These were the voices I would never hear again.
And they were wrong. The human race was savage, not moral. I had lived in an enchanted garden but the savagery, the meaninglessness, the fury had come in over the walls and killed what I loved most.
I had never seen a dead body until I saw my parents’ corpses at the Mineola morgue. I had sent over clothes for them, one of Suchitra’s interns ran that errand, and had chosen coffins online, selecting, as one does, absurdly expensive boxes for them to be burned in. Our home was full of tenured professors, male and female, helping. I had all the help in the world from the leading experts in Sumerian art, subatomic physics, First Amendment law, and Commonwealth literature. But nobody could help me look at the bodies. Suchitra drove me out there in her aging Jeep and because there was no way we could talk about what we needed to talk about we fell into black comedy, remembering particularly gruesome “corpses of the week” from the old HBO series Six Feet Under. My favorite was the woman on a girls’ night out in a rented stretch limo rising through the open sunroof to express her happiness and running face-first into the bucket of a cherry-picker truck. After which her flattened face would have been quite a task for the series regulars to fix.
And then an over-lit room with two gurneys and two horizontal beings under sheets, two horizontal beings who once, horizontal on a different, softer surface, had conjoined joyfully—maybe clumsily—maybe not—I was unable to imagine my parents as gymnastic sex fiends, but I also didn’t want them to be fumbling incompetents—and the result was this blank unthinking entity standing by the gurneys to confirm that they were no longer capable of the act that brought him into being, or of anything else.
They had done their best at the morgue. I went to my mother first and they had removed the terror from her face as well as whatever shards of glass and metal had pierced her and although she was wearing more makeup than she ever did when alive it was her, I could see it was her, and she looked, or I could persuade myself that she looked, at peace. I turned to my father and Suchitra came up behind me and put her cheek against my back and her arms around my waist. Okay, I said, okay, and lifted the sheet. Then finally I wept.
The day after the cremation Nero Golden came across the Gardens to our house—the term “my house” made no sense; my parents were present in every inch of it—and tapped on the French windows with his cane. It was so unexpected—the king knocking on the orphaned commoner’s door—that at first I saw him as an unreal projection of my imagination. In the aftermath of death my grip on the real had loosened. There was an old lady, Mrs. Stone, living on the Gardens (in four high-ceilinged rooms on the piano nobile of a building divided into floor-through apartments), who spoke often of ghosts. This is somebody I haven’t mentioned before, and very likely will leave to her own devices after this guest appearance, a lady whom the Gardens’ children called Hat because of her love of wide-brimmed sun hats, a widow for many years, her former husband a rancher in Texas who struck oil on his land and at once gave up beef cattle for the high life and an internationally admired stamp collection. Mrs. Stone too had buttonholed me by the jungle gym to speak of loss. A death in the family, as also a newborn baby, gave permission for strangers or near strangers to come up and soliloquize. “My husband I never saw after his demise,” she confided. “It seems he was happy to get away. No effort at contact at any time. You live and you learn. But one night on Macdougal Alley I saw a liveried teenage boy—a black kid in a pretty fancy outfit—walking on his knees. Why was he walking on his knees, thought I, there’s no religious history here. Then finally I worked it out. He wasn’t walking on his knees at all. The street level of the alley had risen over time and he was walking on the old ground level and I could only see him down to his knees. A stable boy, possibly, going down the alley to work in the old stables that used to be there in the 1830s, servicing Washington Square North. Or a servant boy, employed perhaps by Gertrude Whitney, who lived there, you know, when she founded her museum. In any case, a ghost, a palpable ghost. And that’s not all.” I made my excuses and left. But the neighborhood’s ghost stories seemed to pursue me in those melancholy days. The ghost of Aaron Burr haunting the Village looking for whores. Musical ghosts, dramatic ghosts, wearing their stage costumes and performing in winter on Commerce Street. My old self wasn’t interested but my orphaned new self let people tell their tales and at night I tried to hear my parents’ laughter echoing in empty rooms. It was in this mood that I saw Nero Golden at the French windows and thought, an apparition. But he was flesh and blood.